Aldehydes are useful compounds as starting materials for chemical reaction and fragrance materials. Especially, aliphatic aldehydes having a specific molecular weight are useful as fragrance materials by themselves, and further used as starting materials for derivatives having different fragrance notes.
As methods for producing aldehydes, conventionally, dehydrogenation, oxidation reaction and the like that use alcohol as a starting material are known. Among these, since dehydrogenation is an endothermic reaction while oxidation reaction is an exothermic reaction, dehydrogenation is often adopted as the production method of aldehydes because thermal control of the reaction is easy. Accordingly, catalysts for dehydrogenation also have been studied.
For example, for the purpose of achieving high-yield production with easy process, Patent Document 1 discloses a production method of aldehydes by reacting alcohol in the presence of a film-type dehydrogenation catalyst for aldehyde production, which is used in aldehyde production using alcohol as a starting material.
For the purpose of improving yield and selectivity of aldehydes, Patent Document 2 discloses a production method of aldehydes in which fatty alcohol is continuously dehydrogenated in the presence of a copper/zinc oxide catalyst at a temperature of 200° C. to 280° C. and a pressure of 10 mbar to 1 bar.